"Bye bye. Kiss kiss. Do lunch maybe, sometime. If universe still exists." Welcome to the world of Lewis Deathstalker. Descendant of a hero turned god, a Paragon of virtue - you get to kill baddies, it's in the job description - and soon to be the galaxy's public enemy number one (but that's all down to an unfortunate misunderstanding). In between racking up every space opera/fantasy cliché going, Simon R Green unmercifully pillages plot lines from The Magnificent Seven, Arthurian myth and his own earlier Deathstalker novels, coming up with an over-the-top masterpiece that veers between brutal comedy and touching riffs on love, loyalty and betrayal. On the side of the baddies is Paragon Finn Durandal. Ranged against him is Lewis Deathstalker, opera singer/queen-to-be Jesamine Flower and an alien who is impressed that humans have managed to legitimise violence by calling it war. Bloody funny and extremely bloody.

Light Music, by Kathleen Ann Goonan (Gollancz, £6.99)

A floating city prepares to blast off into space, and a talking coyote tries to explain nowness to an augmented human on a mission to find the Radio Cowboy, whose gun fires songs. An Argentine mother goes searching for her son, who may have been turned into a pillar of light, and finds instead a doll who needs to be human. Meanwhile, the world has been flooded with alien radio pulses, sentient cities are fed information by bees, an autistic child hammers out music reflecting the nature of space/time, and people can live backwards. In the excitement about the new New Wave of British SF, it's easy to forget that US authors such as Kathleen Ann Goonan have been turning out novels every bit as weird and challenging as anything produced over here. Light Music is the final novel in the sequence begun with Queen City Jazz and continued with Mississippi Blues and Crescent City Rhapsody . As ever with Goonan, it's a delight, albeit a complex one.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (Gollancz, £5.99)

You already know the story - or if you don't, you should. It's Thursday lunchtime and the Earth is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Luckily for Arthur Dent, whose house gets demolished that very morning by the local council, old friend/unexpected alien Ford Prefect is on hand to explain that Arthur really must stop sulking and swallow three pints of beer and some dry-roasted peanuts. So begins The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , the novel of the 1978 radio show that became a TV series that's going to be turned into a major Hollywood film, sometime, honest. As well as doing more to make SF mainstream than any novel before or since, Hitchhiker's proved an almost impossible act to follow. Now reissued at bargain price in elegant hardback along with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe and Everything, it is essential reading for all carbon-based, ape-descended bipedal life-forms.

The Meq, by Steve Cash (Macmillan, £10.99)

This is a fantasy novel without swords and sorcery, a vampire novel without vampires. In 1881, a train working its way down one side of the Rocky Mountains hits a washed-out section of track and crashes, killing everyone except the 12-year-old Zianno Zezen. It is Zianno's birthday, the first in an endless succession of 12th birthdays - because he is Meq, although he doesn't know that yet, and the Meq are an ancient race of near-immortals. Rescued by a Jewish trader, Zianno is taken to a boarding house in St Louis, and discovers that there are other Meq, who look like him but are far older and possessed of powers Z didn't realise he had. There are also walk-on parts for TS Eliot and Tz'u Hsi. Steve Cash wrote a couple of 1970s pop hits and was a founder member of the cult American band the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. His impressive debut crosses under-stated fantasy with an elegant, not-quite-coming-of-age story.